I believe in the saying that you cannot get too much education. This is especially true when recreational drugs are concerned. The message against experimenting with and using drugs needs to be a constant in your face action. Sometimes that is not enough, but it is all we can really do. Sometimes tragedy happens anyway. This is the tale of one such tragedy.
This is a perfect example of how one act of stupidity can destroy an entire family. As reported in www.theguardian.com.
Ellie Rowe, from Glastonbury, Somerset (England) , took the drug – an anesthetic and painkiller in human and veterinary medicine while at the BoomTown Fair last summer. The teenager was volunteering as a steward at the festival with a friend, Stephanie Peirce, when she snorted a line of ketamine powder having drunk a few cans of lager during the day.
The 18-year-old Peirce fell asleep in their tent after taking the drug and came around to find Rowe, also 18, unconscious.
On-site paramedics attempted to revive Rowe, including giving her an emergency tracheotomy to aid her breathing, until an ambulance arrived and took her to the Royal Hampshire county hospital in Winchester where she was pronounced dead.
Toxicology tests showed Rowe had 2.14mg of ketamine per liter of blood in her system, which is the second lowest fatal dosage of the drug recorded. Rowe died as a result of alcohol and ketamine toxicity and central nervous system depression having taken ketamine and alcohol.
Like most overdoses, this one was a tragic accident. Ellie was a young girl who would have had no idea whatsoever that what she did would cause her death. She was not a habitual drug user, she thought it would be fine.
I would hope that others could learn from this tragedy lest their lives and families get destroyed as well. It would be nice if mandatory drug classes could help keep others from making the same mistake.